Interview with Brody Condon

IntroductionIf life were a game, LA based artist, Brody Condon, would probably be its designer. From recreating the political mess of the FBI's assault on David Koresh's Branch Davidian Complex with his C-Level collaboration, "Waco: Resurrection", to emphasizing the violence quotient of mainstream video games with "Adam Killer", Condon's work is both a reflection on the history of gaming and a cautionary realization of its future. His presence in next year's Whitney Biennial, "Velvet Strike", (created with fellow artists Anne-Marie Schliener and Joane Leandre), is a slap in the face to the hard-core gaming community. The online multi-player shooter subverts the death and destruction of "Counter-Strike", by allowing players to plaster graphics of peace symbols and anti-war slogans on the 3D walls. This year, one of Condon's students designed a game called "9-11 Survivor", a third person's victim's perspective of the tragic event that was eventually pulled offline for obvious reasons. If the future of gaming combines virtual and physical space with themes based on actual events, Condon might be leading the revolution. His work is a poignant, although sometimes upsetting vision of the merging of interactive entertainment, international media, and personal life experiences. What follows is an interview I conducted with Condon about his motives as an artist, academic, game designer, and pop culture enthusiast.

BC: I don't play games as much as I used to. I tend to be more interested in the elements that surround games and game culture. To some extent, most of the screen based games I consumed in the past, and continue to consume now, are forgettable. I suppose I am bitter about all the lost years of screen time. I could have been accomplishing something at least pseudo-productive. On a more positive note, I still love the pure aesthetic joy of watching the progression from one graphics generation to another. Forming a intuitive relationship with those images, and now having the ability to crack them open, rearrange, and play with those aesthetics and structures at this point through emulators, PC game modding, and console hacking, etc. is a blessing.

JBC: Are you satisfied with the state of games today? What would you change or leave the same?

BC: As happy as I am with movement of games and game culture into the mainstream, I somehow yearn for the days when being "the kid who could beat ANY game," was not exactly a badge of honor. It took a certain sense of fortitude to persist in your gaming hobby. It was dangerous to walk around your neighborhood on a weekend with a couple cartridges and an Advanced Dungeons and Dragons First Edition Player's Handbook under your arm. Little did the guy who came at me on the sidewalk know that D&D books could be used as weapons. Especially if stacked properly in a thin duffel bag and swung by the handles, they can become a sort of make-shift bludgeoning weapon. Years later I found out that guy had a father that committed suicide, then he broke his leg and dropped out of school at some point. Eventually after a party he wandered out to the highway and threw himself into the path of an oncoming tractor-trailer. I'm not kidding.

JBC: Your work seems to be about emphasizing cliches found in games, especially the death scene in "Adam Killer". What is important about this topic and what has this approach taught you?

BC: I am interested in these cliched game play structures as a material. Whether it is a kid making images of his domestic environment juxtaposed with the trademark FPS hand and gun at the bottom of the image, or the concept of the "re-spawn", which contains interesting links to reincarnation and resurrection. Again, these cliches are also great cultural indicators. They represent and at the same time repetitively inform the emotions and psychology of the player. What does the empty shell of the character mesh, which has an interior constructed of "gibs", or small gut-like portions, that explode and replace the body mesh inform us about our current relationship with death and the interior of the body? Given the long history of representation of the body, I find this contemporary shift in those representations and the material they are created with a great site to dig for content. At the same time, it's a desperate attempt to work out the box that the consumption of those images have placed me in.

JBC: You also seem to focus on aggregating the connection between real life events and how these could or might be played out in gaming environments. Do you see game spaces as a logical extension of physical spaces or an antithesis? How do real events affect gaming and vice versa?

BC: Game spaces may be no more antithetical to, or extensions of, actual spaces than the perspective translation of 3-dimensional natural phenomena onto 2-dimensional surfaces in the 15th century. The tools have just been updated. A Cartesian grid with simulated perspective is the first thing I see when I open up my 3D modeling program. The crossover between level and environment design in games, and traditional architectural practice is obviously growing due the success of game environments that mimic reality. Scenarios like The Getaway, and True Crime Streets of LA are GTA3 knockoffs that take place in simulations London and LA are great examples. This simulation of a city's architecture and urban planning has the ability to alter the perception of the city to those that live in and outside the city, possibly as much as the actual physical site. What also interests me are the subtle differences in the game version, the easy rearrangement of structures and streets to fit game play scenarios. On the other hand, I feel like architecture has taken these environments too lightly. Especially fantasy environments are discarded as only an aesthetic surface, and not as inspiration for new structures and patterns of movement through them. Imagine constructed spaces inspired by the idea of going downtown to your bank, jumping from platform to platform, to reach your ATM located in a floating Necropolis of the Undead Scourge from Warcraft III.

JBC: Is there anything a game can't emulate? What are the main problems in games today? What are they missing and what are they failing at?

BC: There are a horde of problems. I suppose targeting problematic issues in gaming depends on what angle you are concerned with, cultural implications, business strategies, game dev education, etc. However, the core problem is not located within games, it is the lack of any substantial media literacy dialogue within the public school education system in the states. Not to mention the current information bubble that surrounds us here like an invisible shield.

JBC: Are people who play games (such as hardcore gamers) interested in your work? Who plays your games and how are they affected?

BC: [My] work has been labeled "Gayer than actual gay people." by the online gaming community. In this case it was specifically about the work "Velvet-Strike" that I contributed to. We (Anne-Marie Schliener and Joane Leandre) also received near death threats and other fun comments such as:

----- Original Message ----->>Subject: Velvet-Strike... POINTLESS!>>>>Hi,>>I wanted to say I don't support YOUR stupid little brigade to create>>peace and love and shit like that, face it its just POINTLESS BULLSHIT!>>If you think that you can actually stop hate, then you're just a fucking>>moron, it's like trying to say that the DEA will actually stop drug>>trafficking. Those two things will never be stopped. Human nature is to>>hate the enemy. And another thing don't flood are fucking games with this>>"LOVEY DOVEY BULLSHIT!" I almost hate you people more than my enemies. So>>one last thing, If you and your queer little hippy friends don't like>>America, then FUCKING LEAVE! GO FUCK UP CANADA OR SOMETHING!!!>> - Sincerely, your worst enemy--------------------------------

Otherwise, I think any direct and positive relationship with the actual game development community has been fairly non-existent, and mostly relegated to the traditional and media art circuit. However, now that we have made the jump from modifying and hacking existing games to using middleware game engines, there is more industry crossover in a playable piece I recently worked on like Waco: Resurrection ( www.waco.c-level.cc ). However, I should say I've ran into developers and gamers that love the work. It is really such a broad range of individuals that make up the industry and consumer base. Either way, a vernacular dialogue has been started on the ground. Debates are flowing in the game community blogs and forums, at game industry conferences, and among the general public concerning the relationship of games to culture, and the alternative possibilities for game development outside of escapist fantasy narratives and sports simulations.

JBC: Do you think there is a connection between reality TV and gaming?

BC: Hard to say, I have never watched a reality TV show from start to finish. Living in LA, you can sort of throw a stick and find someone who knows about these things, so I just went outside and asked my landlord this question. Him and his wife were contestants on that early reality show, The Amazing Race. He never played games, so we were stuck on this one. However, he did say that the show broke up his marriage, and that those shows are fixed.

JBC: What is your opinion on pervasive gaming? Do you think it's a genre that could succeed and become mainstream like PC, Massively multi-Player Online Games (MMOG), and console games? (When I say "pervasive gaming", I am referring to projects like Blast Theory's "Can You See Me Now?" and It's Alive's "BotFighters". Games that mix digital and real spaces.)

BC: I'm not in the business of prophesizing successful tech, but I checked out Blast Theory's website, and they seem to be having a good time running around in those cool workout-suits with all that nifty PDA gear on them. I'm all for it. As far as the cell phone "pervasive" gaming is concerned, there is such a different relationship with cell phone technology there (UK). I can't imagine how that would go over with a consumer in the US. A car ran over my cell phone and it gives me a headache whenever I use it. I recently spent some time at a SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) event where hundreds of people gathered in the desert for a week of heavily immersive medieval reenactment. True "pervasive" gaming, at these events there are regular battles of hundreds of individuals in homemade armor beating the hell out of each other with sticks in regimented battles. There are bridge battles, castle sieges, etc. The most interesting intersection with screen-based gaming is their incorporation of "Capture the Flag", and "Resurrection" game play structures.

IntroductionIf life were a game, LA based artist, Brody Condon, would probably be its designer. From recreating the political mess of the FBI's assault on David Koresh's Branch Davidian Complex with his C-Level collaboration, "Waco: Resurrection", to emphasizing the violence quotient of mainstream video games with "Adam Killer", Condon's work is both a reflection on the history of gaming and a cautionary realization of its future. His presence in next year's Whitney Biennial, "Velvet Strike", (created with fellow artists Anne-Marie Schliener and Joane Leandre), is a slap in the face to the hard-core gaming community. The online multi-player shooter subverts the death and destruction of "Counter-Strike", by allowing players to plaster graphics of peace symbols and anti-war slogans on the 3D walls. This year, one of Condon's students designed a game called "9-11 Survivor", a third person's victim's perspective of the tragic event that was eventually pulled offline for obvious reasons. If the future of gaming combines virtual and physical space with themes based on actual events, Condon might be leading the revolution. His work is a poignant, although sometimes upsetting vision of the merging of interactive entertainment, international media, and personal life experiences. What follows is an interview I conducted with Condon about his motives as an artist, academic, game designer, and pop culture enthusiast.

BC: I don't play games as much as I used to. I tend to be more interested in the elements that surround games and game culture. To some extent, most of the screen based games I consumed in the past, and continue to consume now, are forgettable. I suppose I am bitter about all the lost years of screen time. I could have been accomplishing something at least pseudo-productive. On a more positive note, I still love the pure aesthetic joy of watching the progression from one graphics generation to another. Forming a intuitive relationship with those images, and now having the ability to crack them open, rearrange, and play with those aesthetics and structures at this point through emulators, PC game modding, and console hacking, etc. is a blessing.

JBC: Are you satisfied with the state of games today? What would you change or leave the same?

BC: As happy as I am with movement of games and game culture into the mainstream, I somehow yearn for the days when being "the kid who could beat ANY game," was not exactly a badge of honor. It took a certain sense of fortitude to persist in your gaming hobby. It was dangerous to walk around your neighborhood on a weekend with a couple cartridges and an Advanced Dungeons and Dragons First Edition Player's Handbook under your arm. Little did the guy who came at me on the sidewalk know that D&D books could be used as weapons. Especially if stacked properly in a thin duffel bag and swung by the handles, they can become a sort of make-shift bludgeoning weapon. Years later I found out that guy had a father that committed suicide, then he broke his leg and dropped out of school at some point. Eventually after a party he wandered out to the highway and threw himself into the path of an oncoming tractor-trailer. I'm not kidding.

JBC: Your work seems to be about emphasizing cliches found in games, especially the death scene in "Adam Killer". What is important about this topic and what has this approach taught you?

BC: I am interested in these cliched game play structures as a material. Whether it is a kid making images of his domestic environment juxtaposed with the trademark FPS hand and gun at the bottom of the image, or the concept of the "re-spawn", which contains interesting links to reincarnation and resurrection. Again, these cliches are also great cultural indicators. They represent and at the same time repetitively inform the emotions and psychology of the player. What does the empty shell of the character mesh, which has an interior constructed of "gibs", or small gut-like portions, that explode and replace the body mesh inform us about our current relationship with death and the interior of the body? Given the long history of representation of the body, I find this contemporary shift in those representations and the material they are created with a great site to dig for content. At the same time, it's a desperate attempt to work out the box that the consumption of those images have placed me in.

JBC: You also seem to focus on aggregating the connection between real life events and how these could or might be played out in gaming environments. Do you see game spaces as a logical extension of physical spaces or an antithesis? How do real events affect gaming and vice versa?

BC: Game spaces may be no more antithetical to, or extensions of, actual spaces than the perspective translation of 3-dimensional natural phenomena onto 2-dimensional surfaces in the 15th century. The tools have just been updated. A Cartesian grid with simulated perspective is the first thing I see when I open up my 3D modeling program. The crossover between level and environment design in games, and traditional architectural practice is obviously growing due the success of game environments that mimic reality. Scenarios like The Getaway, and True Crime Streets of LA are GTA3 knockoffs that take place in simulations London and LA are great examples. This simulation of a city's architecture and urban planning has the ability to alter the perception of the city to those that live in and outside the city, possibly as much as the actual physical site. What also interests me are the subtle differences in the game version, the easy rearrangement of structures and streets to fit game play scenarios. On the other hand, I feel like architecture has taken these environments too lightly. Especially fantasy environments are discarded as only an aesthetic surface, and not as inspiration for new structures and patterns of movement through them. Imagine constructed spaces inspired by the idea of going downtown to your bank, jumping from platform to platform, to reach your ATM located in a floating Necropolis of the Undead Scourge from Warcraft III.

JBC: Is there anything a game can't emulate? What are the main problems in games today? What are they missing and what are they failing at?

BC: There are a horde of problems. I suppose targeting problematic issues in gaming depends on what angle you are concerned with, cultural implications, business strategies, game dev education, etc. However, the core problem is not located within games, it is the lack of any substantial media literacy dialogue within the public school education system in the states. Not to mention the current information bubble that surrounds us here like an invisible shield.

JBC: Are people who play games (such as hardcore gamers) interested in your work? Who plays your games and how are they affected?

BC: [My] work has been labeled "Gayer than actual gay people." by the online gaming community. In this case it was specifically about the work "Velvet-Strike" that I contributed to. We (Anne-Marie Schliener and Joane Leandre) also received near death threats and other fun comments such as:

----- Original Message ----->>Subject: Velvet-Strike... POINTLESS!>>>>Hi,>>I wanted to say I don't support YOUR stupid little brigade to create>>peace and love and shit like that, face it its just POINTLESS BULLSHIT!>>If you think that you can actually stop hate, then you're just a fucking>>moron, it's like trying to say that the DEA will actually stop drug>>trafficking. Those two things will never be stopped. Human nature is to>>hate the enemy. And another thing don't flood are fucking games with this>>"LOVEY DOVEY BULLSHIT!" I almost hate you people more than my enemies. So>>one last thing, If you and your queer little hippy friends don't like>>America, then FUCKING LEAVE! GO FUCK UP CANADA OR SOMETHING!!!>> - Sincerely, your worst enemy--------------------------------

Otherwise, I think any direct and positive relationship with the actual game development community has been fairly non-existent, and mostly relegated to the traditional and media art circuit. However, now that we have made the jump from modifying and hacking existing games to using middleware game engines, there is more industry crossover in a playable piece I recently worked on like Waco: Resurrection ( www.waco.c-level.cc ). However, I should say I've ran into developers and gamers that love the work. It is really such a broad range of individuals that make up the industry and consumer base. Either way, a vernacular dialogue has been started on the ground. Debates are flowing in the game community blogs and forums, at game industry conferences, and among the general public concerning the relationship of games to culture, and the alternative possibilities for game development outside of escapist fantasy narratives and sports simulations.

JBC: Do you think there is a connection between reality TV and gaming?

BC: Hard to say, I have never watched a reality TV show from start to finish. Living in LA, you can sort of throw a stick and find someone who knows about these things, so I just went outside and asked my landlord this question. Him and his wife were contestants on that early reality show, The Amazing Race. He never played games, so we were stuck on this one. However, he did say that the show broke up his marriage, and that those shows are fixed.

JBC: What is your opinion on pervasive gaming? Do you think it's a genre that could succeed and become mainstream like PC, Massively multi-Player Online Games (MMOG), and console games? (When I say "pervasive gaming", I am referring to projects like Blast Theory's "Can You See Me Now?" and It's Alive's "BotFighters". Games that mix digital and real spaces.)

BC: I'm not in the business of prophesizing successful tech, but I checked out Blast Theory's website, and they seem to be having a good time running around in those cool workout-suits with all that nifty PDA gear on them. I'm all for it. As far as the cell phone "pervasive" gaming is concerned, there is such a different relationship with cell phone technology there (UK). I can't imagine how that would go over with a consumer in the US. A car ran over my cell phone and it gives me a headache whenever I use it. I recently spent some time at a SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) event where hundreds of people gathered in the desert for a week of heavily immersive medieval reenactment. True "pervasive" gaming, at these events there are regular battles of hundreds of individuals in homemade armor beating the hell out of each other with sticks in regimented battles. There are bridge battles, castle sieges, etc. The most interesting intersection with screen-based gaming is their incorporation of "Capture the Flag", and "Resurrection" game play structures.